“Why Can’t We Play on Grass?” An Investigation of Discourse on Sterling Shepard’s ACL Tear

Abstract

This manuscript considers public discourse surrounding the link between playing surface and lower-extremity injuries within the context of a case study on New York Giants’ wide-receiver Sterling Shepard’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, with an aim to identify and explain the use of narratives as a function of commenters’ stakeholder groups and expressions of fandom. Such an effort extends scholarship on issues of athlete health policy to non-cognitive and depersonalized injuries and offers insight into which publics are adopting specific cultural frameworks. Bottom-up framing and social identity theory (SIT) were used as frameworks for interpreting the variance in responses. The consideration of 2,633 public tweets revealed six categories, including thematic framing, episodic framing, health-first narratives, performance narratives, sharing the news, and ambiguous negative commentary. Additionally, patterns associated with stakeholder groups and public expressions of fandom offered both support and challenges to heuristic and theoretical bases of knowledge. This manuscript suggests public sporting audiences are embracing more health-conscious frameworks in social media discourse but that the scope of their focus is directed subsequently by their expression and fandom and concern for their teams.